Corrosion due to the environment causes problems in many areas, a particular area being the metal reinforcement members often used in buildings. When such members corrode their dimensions increase, this resulting in damage to the building requiring costly repairs.
There is thus a need for corrosion monitoring apparatus which can be used to determine the corrosivity of different environments and to measure displacements caused by corrosion, such information being useful in material selection and in specifying corrosion protection.
A known method of monitoring corrosion is to expose a metal plate to an environment, and then examine the plate in order to ascertain the effect of the environment thereon.
This method suffers from the disadvantages that the exposure period required is generally very long, ie. of the order of years, and that the examination of the plate is time consuming and expensive.